Abstract : Motivated by the rising demand for remote and improved healthcare, while decreasing the cost of using network infrastructures to ensure time and data rate-constrained applications, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) still form a strongly growing research field. Besides, engineers and researchers are investigating new solutions to supplement mobile communications through developing opportunities for cooperative WBANs. In this context, using network users themselves as relays could complement and extend existing infrastructure networks, while improving network capacity and promoting radio spectrum usage. Yet, network operators, that are already planning for the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing technologies integration, should also think about this new possibility of creating a new type of mobile ad hoc network, where network users themselves are used as simplified ad hoc base stations, to fulfill the desire of sharing real-time information between colocated persons carrying body sensors. This emerging type of network is called Body-to-Body Network (BBN). In a BBN, a radio device situated on one person gathers the sensor data from the sensor nodes worn by that person, and transmit them to a transceiver situated on another person in the nearby area, in order to be processed or relayed to other BBN users. BBNs can find applications in a range of areas such as healthcare, team sports, military, entertainment, as well as exciting social networking experiences. Operating in the popular Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band, the communication links in a BBN will be heavily susceptible to interference between the different radio technologies sharing the limited radio spectrum. Thus, inter-body interference become an important concern for protocol design and quality of service for the BBN end user. Yet, higher layer MAC and networking mechanisms need to be in place to overcome this interference problem. To date, very few studies, that perform in-depth analysis of this type of body-centric scenario, exist. The interference problem in such distributed system, should be tackeled with distributed mechanisms, such as Game Theory. The decision makers in the game are either the WBANs/people forming the BBN or the network operators who control the inter-WBAN communicating devices. These devices have to cope with a limited transmission resource (ISM band) that gives rise to a conflict of interests. This thesis aims at exploring the opportunities to enable inter-WBAN communications by ensuring feasible sharing of the radio spectrum through two challenging research issues. First, mutual and cross-technology interference mitigation, and second, the design of a BBN specific routing protocol applied to an epidemic control application within mass gathering areas, such as the airport, as use case in this thesis. In a first phase, a game theoretical approach is proposed to resolve the distributed interference problem in BBNs. The Socially-aware Interference Mitigation (SIM) game performs twofold: at the WBAN stage, it allocates ZigBee channels to body sensors for intra-WBAN data sensing, and at the BBN stage, it allocates WiFi channels to mobile devices for inter-WBAN data transmitting and relaying. Two algorithms, BR-SIM and SORT-SIM, were developed to search for Nash equilibra to the SIM game. The first (BR-SIM) ensures best response solutions while the second (SORT-SIM) attempts to achieve tradeoff between sub-optimal solutions and short convergence time. Then, in order to highlight the social role of BBNs, the second part of this thesis is devoted to propose an epidemic control application tailored to BBNs, in indoor environment. This application implements a geographic routing protocol, that differentiates WBANs traffic and ensures real-time quarantine strategies. (...)